Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
wattage spiral florescent bulbs, they were designed
to be compliant with the nearly century old “Edison
Screw” E26 base, a 26 mm right-hand threaded
AC connector compliant with IEC Standard No.
60061-1 (7004-21A-2).
Some standards are intentionally vague,
drafted more like general guidance, so they can
still be successful if the system would not suffer
immediate, obvious or catastrophic failure with
minor noncompliance. Indeed, in some domains,
the standards must tolerate predictable variation
in expected activities such as where strong public
policy pressures force such standards to allow
wider acceptable variations to encourage more
effective or efficient compliance. Management
process and financial disclosure standards are
classic examples of standards satisfied by wide
tolerance ranges. For example, there are three
broad categories of audit and accounting compli-
ance variance in financial reporting: rules-based,
principles-based and principles-only. Rules-based
standards are strict in this spectrum of compliance
variance - often expressed in precise language so
they permit less flexibility. On the other end of
this spectrum are principles-only standards for
which compliance is arguably easiest because
they are vaguely expressed. A middle-ground
approach, known as principles-based standards,
are behavioral standards that depend heavily on
professional judgment. Thus, when accounting
or audit standards are rules-based, they may
require more costly and stricter compliance.
When principles-only standards are used, they
provide much less structure and encourage easy
compliance or adaptation to very different lines
of business and business models. Finally, when
principle-based standards are required, there is
a stronger focus on the exercise of professional
judgment, thus suggesting stronger regulation of
such professionals. Many international and ISO
standards in environmental and industrial quality
areas can be evaluated under these three categories.
Standards must be distinguished by the thing
process and professional standards address human
activity directly. By contrast, technical and in-
teroperability standards focus on nonhuman, non-
behavioral characteristics. Technical standards are
common in the natural sciences and engineering,
so most emissions standards are technical because
they prescribe designs or clearly quantifiable
performance measurable by scientific methods.
Of course, emissions standards are only part of
the environmental standards for sustainability.
For example, some environmental management
standards specify cradle to grave tracking, these are
more managerial in character. Thus distinguishing
between behavioral/managerial/professional and
technical standards provides key insight into the
range of environmental standards.
The narrower vision of technical standards
requires a focus solely on the physical properties
of tangible objects. However, modern techni-
cal standards generally require repeated use of
rules, conditions, guidelines, or characteristics
for products as well as their related management
processes, production methods and conformity
assessment. Thus, technical standards increasingly
include all related management system practices
because technical standards increasingly define
terms, they classify components, they describe
procedures, they specify dimensions, materials,
performance, designs, or operations, they measure
quality and quantity of materials, processes, prod-
ucts, systems, services, or practices, they require
particular test methods or sampling procedures,
and they describe the fit and measurements of
materials size or strength (OMB A-119 1998).
It should now be clear that it will become
increasingly difficult to distinguish adequately
between purely technical standards and purely
behavioral/managerial/professional standards.
While the U.S. Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) defines technical standards to include
“ancillary human and management processes,” the
OMB's attempt to exclude professional codes of
conduct simply confuses any clear standardization
